Kathy Villeneuva, left, talked with Rhonda Soulia, center, and husband Larry Soulia, on Crystal View Terrace in Riverside in 2010. The Soulias were petitioning the city to open yellow metal gates that block the street, an issue the City Council may decide Tuesday, Nov. 17.

Kathy Villeneuva, left, talked with Rhonda Soulia, center, and husband Larry Soulia, on Crystal View Terrace in Riverside in 2010. The Soulias were petitioning the city to open yellow metal gates that block the street, an issue the City Council may decide Tuesday, Nov. 17.

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Riverside's Overlook Parkway has two gaps where the road was never connected. The City Council voted Tuesday, Nov. 17, not to finish the road and to take steps to remove it from the city’s transportation plan.

Kathy Villeneuva, left, talked with Rhonda Soulia, center, and husband Larry Soulia, on Crystal View Terrace in Riverside in 2010. The Soulias were petitioning the city to open yellow metal gates that block the street, an issue the City Council may decide Tuesday, Nov. 17.

One short portion of Riverside’s Overlook Parkway between the Canyon Crest and Alessandro Heights neighborhoods will remain a road to nowhere.

City officials decided Tuesday night, Nov. 17, never to connect it to the rest of the parkway.

The parkway was planned decades ago as a major thoroughfare that would link the city’s easternmost neighborhoods with Victoria Avenue and the Casa Blanca neighborhood and later, the 91.

But past city leaders, under political pressure, didn’t require developers to build two short segments, and residents have fought over those gaps ever since.

The city will get rid of yellow metal gates installed in the mid 2000s on Crystal View Terrace and Green Orchard Place to block cut-through drivers trying to skirt the parkway’s gaps.

The City Council voted unanimously to take out the gates – also a source of residents’ complaints – and to remove the parkway from city transportation plans.

It will be some time before Overlook is officially off the books. The city must study long-term traffic consequences to nearby neighborhood streets and major roads. That could begin in 2016.

About 75 residents turned out for Tuesday’s meeting. Most who spoke opposed completing the parkway, saying it would send thousands more cars not only into the wealthier areas it winds through, but into densely-packed Casa Blanca and the Arlington Heights greenbelt, home to the remains of the city’s citrus industry.

“Continuing Overlook would force all this traffic into the greenbelt,” Councilman Chris Mac Arthur said. “I think that this needs to be put to bed once and for all.”

Several residents also urged the council to make a final decision and not “kick the can down the road,” referring to previous councils’ inaction on the issue.

Some pointed to the strides made in Casa Blanca, which after years of improvements has the city’s lowest crime rate. They said that progress would be ruined by thousands of additional cars the complete parkway would funnel to their neighborhood.

“Great cities are not about good traffic flow,” resident Steve Jones told the council. “Great cities are about great neighborhoods.”

But a handful of residents argued that not finishing the parkway would be a short-sighted and nonsensical choice.

“If you want to believe that by not putting Overlook through that you can wish the traffic away, it’s there,” resident Dan Loomis said. “Overlook was built for this kind of traffic.”

A city environmental report found that traffic in the area would likely get worse regardless of whether the parkway is completed. Finishing the road would affect at least a dozen intersections in the area, which in some cases would need new turn lanes and traffic lights, but a city traffic engineer told the council the parkway can handle the additional cars and that most of the traffic is local.

A council vote to finish the parkway would have come with other problems. Earlier estimates put the cost of the two final segments, one of which would require a bridge, at $5 million to $10 million, and the project likely would have become embroiled in a lawsuit.

Some residents and Councilman Paul Davis suggested connecting the road would violate Prop. R and Measure C, voter-approved growth control measures that protect the greenbelt from added traffic.

Alicia Robinson covers Anaheim for The Orange County Register. She previously spent 10 years at The Press-Enterprise writing about Riverside and local government as well as Norco, Corona, homeless issues, Alzheimer's disease, streetcars, butterflies, horses and chickens. She grew up in the Midwest but earned Southern California native status during many hours spent in traffic. Two big questions Alicia tries to answer in stories about government are: how is it supposed to work, and how is it working?